Making Space For Learning
Trauma Informed Practice in Schools
by the Australian Childhood Foundation
Understanding Trauma in Children
Traumatised children frequently do not have their feeling acknowledged. They do not trust their feelings. The strength of their fear, shame and sadness can overwhelm them. They often experience problems with learning new things, coping with new people and situations. the memories of the abuse are pronounced and ever present. Small reminders may cause them to relive their fear and confusion.
What is Trauma?
Simple trauma - Overwhelming and painful, life-threatening and or/have potential to cause serious injury. Often a single incident, shorter in duration. Egs, earthquakes, car accidents, house fires, bushfires and cyclones
Complex trauma - involves inter-personal threat, violence and violation. Includes multiple incidences and therefore a longer duration. Almost always associated with stigma and a sense of shame by the victim. Egs, child abuse, bullying, domestic violence, rape, war and imprisonment.
Developmental Trauma - Trauma that has effected the child's brain development, often leading to splintered development. The trauma undermines the very resources that could help the child recover - the stability and predictability of their connections with others.
How Complex Trauma Effects the Developing Brain?
Complex developmental trauma reduces the capacity of the thinking part of children's brains to shape the way they react to challenges in their environment. As a result they appear to behave instinctively and sometimes inappropriately, without knowing why. They are also not able to easily influence their feelings when faced with perceived threat or increases in their experience of stress.
It impairs the bridge between the left and right hemisphere. As a result, the children find it difficult to name their feelings, read social cues and respond in social exchanges.
It heightens their arousal base to the extent that they can live in a constant state of vigilance and heightened alarm. They can be easily triggered by seemingly minor issues.
It locks down their capacity to adapt to change in their environment. They will use fixed and repetitive behavioural routines in situations where they feel uneasy, as this is comforting - even if the routines are destructive or harmful to others.
They will lack the ability to adapt to changes in situations and contexts.
They will react rather than respond.
They are unable to take in much information as their brains are in overdrive.
Their memory systems are under stress so they will fail to consolidate new information.
Their future is without plans or a sense of possibilty.
Trauma And The Body
For traumatised children the best option is to always be alert to danger and consider any change a threat
The body makes itself as efficient as possible by inhibiting any non-survival-related process such as digestion.
It focuses on conserving energy and resources for survival. There is no room for new information to be considered.
The brain and body respond in thinking, feeling and behavioural patterns which are ingrained.
Exposure to chronic stress desensitises the threat detection area of the brain and sometimes a threat can be perceived when there is none.
The individual becomes stuck in this cycle of trying to keep everything as familiar as possible. They rely on parents and caring adults to help support them by removing the threat or reducing its impact.
Children may not progress much further than the milestones they had reached when the trauma began.
The best way to support these children is to adapt the environment to the child's needs. The environment needs to be safe, predictable and nuturing.
Those working with these children need to be understanding and compassionate and offer orientation for hope and growth.
Trauma and Memory
When routines change the children are disrupted. Interaction with carers that repair disrupted routines engender trust in relationships.
However, children who are provided with chronically inconsistent responses are unable to form the memory templates they subsequently need to feel settled.
As children mature they are able to store language and concepts. Memory structures increasingly develop the capacity to store sensory dimensions separately to to the details (the who, when, where) Recall can bring about memories without sensations. Sensations can be described separately and with the events which precipitated them. They are able to reflect on memories in clam states. They can suspend painful memories in time so as to not be overwhelmed by the intensity of sensory experiences from their past when it is counterproductive to them.
However, memories are different for a child who has been through trauma. When they are exposed or confronted by cues associated with the trauma their memories flood back with the full force of sensory memory fragments. The child is, in the moment, unable to understand that the response they are having relates to the threat of harm posed by the raised voice of an abusive parent in the past, and not by the non-threatening raised voice in the classroom at present.
As a result they shut down their memories and do not engage with them, As such they do not rehearse building memories about themselves overtime andn will struggle to recall their success stories about themselves and relationships. Their memories do not form the stories they need to understand who they are, what they are good at and what relationships with others means to them,
Traumatised children need relationships that provide the memory resources that they lack or actively do not use. They need opportunities to keep their memory systems active through practice and rehearsal in conditions in which some of their internal stress and arousal has been reduced. In calmer states, children have access to greater cortical resources. They begin to have greater access to their working memory. They are able to consolidate learning. Traumatised children need to relief of a safe place to lay down new and helpful memories, which in time can begin to supersede the pain of their past.
Trauma and Emotions
Children who have experiences trauma have limited emotional literacy. They do not understand their feelings and are unable to explain them for others to understand. Negative and critical feelings, suh as confusion, shame, guilt, disgust and worry can trigger off memory traces of the trauma.
Traumatised children cannot easily access their cortex to calm themselves down or regulate the strength of their feelings. Adults in their lives need to calm and comfort them to sooth the cortex. Children become aware of their internal state by seeing how others react to their feelings, this is how they develop emotional literacy. Children compose a framework for their feelings from the predictability of the responses they receive from others to their behaviour and emotional state. Predictability is the key through which children manage to negotiate how they have their needs met in their social exchanges. Consistent, congruent and validating responses give them the effective blueprint for organising their internal world.
Instead of validating and acknowledging a child's feeling and abusive parent or carer may escalate the child's confusion or fear by responding aggressively or blaming the child for their behaviour. In unpredictable relationships, parents and carers may sometimes respond safely and supportively, then without warning, they might react angrily, aggressively or negatively. In this situation, there is no predictability, so the child's life remains disorganised. The child does not trust the external world to offer stability.
Another emotion experienced by traumatised children is the feeling of disconnect, It serves the purpose of allowing them to disconnect so they do not feel so strongly the abuse.
When they are triggered, their emotional states are re-experienced with the similar intensity with which they were stored.Tracking a child's emotional states over time is a way of staying i touch with how, why and when different feeling become experienced and expressed.
Emotions assist children to belong to a social group who share their feelings. Traumatised children often feel different to others. If trauma or stress occurs during periods of time when the right hemisphere is more dominant in its maturation, then children will experience difficulties in being
able to read and interpret social cues of others. They look for others whose history and background makes its easier for them to be with. In this group they do not have to tolerate others feelings because there is only a limited range of feelings ever expressed. Without intervention aimed at supporting better connection and social skills, traumatised children are likely to experience increasing levels of isolation.
Traumatised emotional states affect children without warning and invisibly.
Trauma and Relationships
The more predictable the response to them the greater the confidence that children develop in both what they feel and how they understand the world. In particular, they learn that they are able to solve problems.
Supporting children to re-experience relationships differently is the key to trauma recovery and change. These compensatory relational experiences centre around the following key features:
- there is a consistent approach to communication
- children have their feelings validated and acknowledged by adults
- children experience adults being protective of them
- children experience adults trying to take care of them even when their behaviour is challenging and complex.
With these examples the children can have hope that not all adults are the same. Over time, as the experiences are repeated, they become working templates for the children to apply in social exchanges and relationships.
Trauma and Behaviour
Comfort seeking - Children will seek out comfort from people whom they see as safe, consistent and nurturing. This includes seeking out physical attention from others, sitting close and engaging in parallel play, wanting to be fed and wanting their hands or heads to be stroked. They might engage in self soothing routines.
Self protection - Children will try to avoid intimacy at all costs. They do this for their own protection.
The key to reshaping trauma-based behaviour is to understand it and respond to its source rather than how it is expressed. Small examples of teasing can be experienced as large shifts in allegiance, rejection or humiliation. The relationship component of behaviour needs to be kept in constant focus when trying to understand the needs of children effected by trauma.
Trauma-based behaviour has served a survival function for the child. It may continue to serve its purpose in the child's current context. As such, this behaviour is most likely to stop when its function is no longer needed. These children will not necessarily respond to incentive-based reward systems.
Strategies for addressing trauma-based behaviour will be most successful when they are applied purposefully across multiple settings in which children live, play and learn. With reduced memory capacity traumatised children and young people will find it difficult to generalise their learning from specific situations to related and unrelated contexts. No single approach will work al the time. Always consider the internal stress levels experienced by the child. Effective strategies will offer comfort and calm as the basis for change, aleviating additional stress on an already stressed body-brain system.
Trauma and Learning
The ability of traumatised children to learn is greatly compromised. Their neurobiology is stressed, their realtionships feel unstable, their emotional state is in flux, they find it difficult to stay calm or regain a state of calm if they feel distressed or perturbed. Change is perceived as dangerous, their memory is under pressure, they are disconnected form themselves and time, their behaviours rule them and new experiences and new information carry with them elements of threats and uncertainty.
Depending on when the trauma happened during brain development children may experience difficulties with being able to process language, difficulties with executing logic and sequences tasks (this will mean maths and problem solving tasks will be extremely difficult), they will find narrative-based techniques complex and at times indecipherable. As sport they will struggle to play.
Also the constant interaction with others will cause a lot of stress.
Using SPACE
Staged
Predictable
Adaptive
Connected
Enabled
Trauma informed practice has as its main ambition to support children to reset their baseline internal stress and arousal levels in order to bring their cortext back in line.
Staged - Strategies aimed at resourcing traumatised children need to follow a staged pattern of conceptualisation and implementation for them to succeed.
Predicatabilty - The people and the environment in their lives needs to be predictable. With stress reduced the children will have the chance to experience themselves as more flexible and be more able to tolerate small degrees of change.
Adaptive - In school contexts, traumatised children struggle to internalise collective rules and understand the consequences for breaking them. Strategies which promote adaptability in children are those which are able to maintain multiple meaning for behaviour and remain open to multiple options for intervention.
Connected - Traumatised children develop insecure and unstable templates for forming and maintaining relationships. Effective strategies to support traumatised children emphasis relationships with safe and consistent adults and peers as the foundation for change. Relationships become the primary vehicle through which new meanings about feelings, beliefs, behaviour and idenity are resourced to emerge.
Enabled - Traumatised children find the process of understanding themselves difficult. They are challenged in their capacity to identify their feelings and understand them and communicate them to others. Effective strategies for responding to traumatised children in the school context will enable them to make linkages between and give meaning to their experiences of their past and their present, the feelings and their behaviour, their thoughts and their actions.
Putting Space Into Practice
Suggestions -
- create spaces for the students to move into and still be part of the class group. Tactile corners in the classroom that have beanbags or a rocking chair, stress balls or a plush rug.
- create structures in which children can make choices during their day.
- written plans for children that are made accessible to relevant school staff.
- keep a journal of the child's emotions over the course of a week. Look back to see what factors are influencing a child's behaviour
- capture and record the experiences of a student at school every week. Join the child in reflecting on these experiences in a sequenced way that enables the student to rehearse building a narrative about their involvement at school. Recognise and acknowledge the student's involvement in school activities.
- provide impromptu fun experiences which are not defined as rewards. Fun and playfulness act as resources in the lives of stressed children.
- use a digital camera in class to 'catch' the students doing the right thing and help them reflect on their strengths and commitments.
- Include stretching and physically relaxing activities at predictable times each day
- create a calm box; photos of favourite things, sensory rich objects
- build rhythmical rehearsal opportunities that support arousal regulation. For example, use the excitement - calming - concentration phases in regular classroom activities throughout the day
- set up a shadow board outlining what the students will need to each class/lesson/subject
- integrate emotional literacy activities into the curriculum to support students to recognise, name, manage feelings and learn to respond to others' expression of feelings
- rehearse narrative structure by drawing the day's journey using different media including chalk, text, wool, clay
- create videos/dvds which provide a history of the year/class/week/camp experience and enable review of this work
- utilise music in the classroom - particularly rhythmical drumming
Final Words:
Hope is the outcome of change for children. For these children, hope comes from feeling that their experiences of trauma and stress no longer separates them from their friends and family/ They know that they do not have to feel alone any more. They can feel safe, secure and loved. School itself becomes easier to navigate. They have greater attentive capacity. They have access to more of their memory resources. They can take in more information and store it. They can recall it and integrate it. They develop new skills. They learn and come to enjoy learning.
